Social Research on Housing in the United States: Directions and Themes

I shall present a selective overview of recent themes and directions in social research on housing in the U.S. I narrowed the topic by focusing on research centering on the family and on neighborhood. These topics offer ways to concentrate on social research and to narrow a rather broad topic. My meaning of social research encompasses work not only by sociologists. It also includes the separate or collaborative work of other disciplines, especially psychology, anthropology, social psychology, architecture and urban planning. Research on housing has from its Post-World War II flowering been an interdisciplinary enterprise. And it continues to be so. Several themes stand out in the last 15 years. A longstanding and overriding framework in housing research involves physical determinism - the assumption that the house, neighborhood, community or town influences and shapes how people live. This view has remained predominant (Schorr, 1963); but there are growing reactions against it to suggest that people select environments according to their preferences more than being shaped by those environments (Pynoos et al, 1973) and that people and environments interact to affect each other Ti eller 1966). On the whole, physical determinism remains the strongest of the orientations: it takes a physical setting as given and assesses the impact on life styles, values and attitudes, or it involves design of housing environments which presume to create desirable social conditions. The deterministic view and reactions against it permeate each of the four research emphases which are described next

Fluid physics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer experiments in space

An overstudy committee was formed to study and recommend fundamental experiments in fluid physics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer for experimentation in orbit, using the space shuttle system and a space laboratory. The space environment, particularly the low-gravity condition, is an indispensable requirement for all the recommended experiments. The experiments fell broadly into five groups: critical-point thermophysical phenomena, fluid surface dynamics and capillarity, convection at reduced gravity, non-heated multiphase mixtures, and multiphase heat transfer. The Committee attempted to assess the effects of g-jitter and other perturbations of the gravitational field on the conduct of the experiments. A series of ground-based experiments are recommended to define some of the phenomena and to develop reliable instrumentation

'Making it count': incentives, student effort and performance

This paper examines how incentives to participate in online assessments (quizzes) affect students’ effort and performance. Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt online quizzes. We find tournament incentives and participation incentives to be ineffective in increasing quiz participation. In contrast, making the quiz counts towards the final grade substantially increases participation. We find no evidence of displacement of effort between weeks. Using a natural experiment which provides variation in assessment weighting of the quizzes between two cohorts, we find that affected students obtain better exam grades. We estimate the return to 10% assessment weighting to be around 0.27 of a standard deviation in the in-term exam grade. We find no evidence that assessment weighting has unintended consequences, i.e., that increased quiz effort: displaces effort over the year; reduces other forms of effort; or reduces (effort and thus) performance in other courses. Finally, assessment weighting induced effort increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 17%

Regression Discontinuity Designs with Clustered Data

Regression discontinuity designs have become popular in empirical studies due to their attractive properties for estimating causal effects under transparent assumptions. Nonetheless, most popular procedures assume i.i.d. data, which is unreasonable in many common applications. To fill this gap, we derive the properties of traditional local polynomial estimators in a fixed- setting that allows for cluster dependence in the error term. Simulation results demonstrate that accounting for clustering in the data while selecting bandwidths may lead to lower MSE while maintaining proper coverage. We then apply our cluster-robust procedure to an application examining the impact of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits on neighborhood characteristics and low-income housing supply

Effectiveness of group body psychotherapy for negative symptoms of schizophrenia: multicentre randomised controlled trial

Background Negative symptoms of schizophrenia have a severe impact on functional outcomes and treatment options are limited. Arts therapies are currently recommended but more evidence is required. Aims To assess body psychotherapy as a treatment for negative symptoms compared with an active control (trial registration:ISRCTN84216587). Method Schizophrenia out-patients were randomised into a 20-session body psychotherapy or Pilates group. The primary outcome was negative symptoms at end of treatment. Secondary outcomes included psychopathology, functional, social and treatment satisfaction outcomes at treatment end and 6-months later. Results In total, 275 participants were randomised. The adjusted difference in negative symptoms was 0.03 (95% CI –1.11 to 1.17), indicating no benefit from body psychotherapy. Small improvements in expressive deficits and movement disorder symptoms were detected in favour of body psychotherapy. No other outcomes were significantly different. Conclusions Body psychotherapy does not have a clinically relevant beneficial effect in the treatment of patients with negative symptoms of schizophreni

The Economic Resource Receipt of New Mothers

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage or postbirth employment does not protect new mothers and their families from poverty, but education, race, and the receipt of economic supports from social networks do

A Dynamic Model of Unemployment with Migration and Delayed Policy Intervention

The purpose of this paper is to build and analyse a model of unemployment, where jobs search is open to both natives and migrant workers. Markets and government intervention respond jointly to unemployment when creating new jobs. Full employment of resources is the focal point of policy action, stimulating vacancy creation. We acknowledge that policy is implemented with delays, and capture labour market outcomes by building a non-linear dynamic system. We observe jobs separation and matching, and extend our model to an open economy with migration and delayed policy intervention meant to reduce unemployment. We analyse the stability behaviour of the resulting equilibrium for our dynamic system, including models with Dirac and weak kernels. We simulate our model with alternative scenarios, where policy action towards jobs creation considers both migration and unemployment, or just unemployment

High Dimensional Sparse Econometric Models: An Introduction

In this chapter we discuss conceptually high dimensional sparse econometric models as well as estimation of these models using L1-penalization and post-L1-penalization methods. Focusing on linear and nonparametric regression frameworks, we discuss various econometric examples, present basic theoretical results, and illustrate the concepts and methods with Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application. In the application, we examine and confirm the empirical validity of the Solow-Swan model for international economic growth